Being There: Experiencing Residential School through Plays by Indigenous Writers with Annie Smith
This webinar is a preview of the course, Being There: Experiencing Residential School through Plays by Indigenous Writers that will be offered in Spring of 2025 with Annie Smith.
Course Description
Over the last two years, in particular, and since the TRC revelations in 2015, the experience of too many generations of Indigenous children has become, finally, a part of Canadian consciousness. Families devastated and children isolated and abused, these are stories that are hard to face, but face we must. Indigenous playwrights have written to illuminate the complex experiences of children in these institutions so that we can begin to understand the residential school system and its ongoing impacts in First Nations communities. That is the goal of this course – through reading six plays by Indigenous writers from across Canada, we will discover the enclosed worlds Indigenous children entered when they were taken away from their communities and how some survived and some succumbed.